MadDog linked to the letter that Dennis Blair and Eric Holder sent the Senate describing the process by which 6 agencies and a 100 staffers meticulously decided the ultimate fate of Gitmo detainees–who could be released or imprisoned elsewhere, who could be tried, and (presumably) who had to be held indefinitely. It might be a [...]

I’m working on a big post on the May 2005 Bradbury Memos. But I wanted to point out this tidbit about them in the interim. As you might recall, the Jim Comey emails (probably leaked by the torture apologists last summer) provide a few clues about why Comey objected to the May 10, 2005 Combined [...]

I’ve had a frazzled few days (dealing with stuff like dodgy cars) and I’m about to bury myself deep in the weeds. So I thought I’d throw up a few links to keep you all occupied so as to ensure there’s still something left in the likker cabinet for when I come out of the [...]

Time has another one of those Rahm v. Holder profiles. It is notable from the slew of other ones for two reasons. The anonymous source calling Holder a coward First, the story features several main sources for this story: Lindsey Graham, speaking on the record. Holder, issuing no-nonsense statements like this, on the record: And [...]

The 9th Circuit has ruled that John Ashcroft can be sued for wrongful detention of an American citizen. From an ACLU press release: The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charging that former Attorney General John Ashcroft is personally responsible for the wrongful detention of an innocent American, Abdullah al-Kidd, can go forward, the U.S. Court [...]

Jack Goldsmith and Ben Wittes have an op-ed up in which, claiming that the PR value to military commissions is minimal, Obama should just not give KSM a trial of any sort. They make a clever move in which they first cursorily dismiss the value of civilian trials. A trial potentially adds three things: the [...]

This is going to be another weedy post… I wanted to put two totally bureaucratic pages (PDF 23-24) from the recent FOIA dump into the context of the other known documents in the chronology. The first page is an “Executive Correspondence Routing Sheet,” sent from CIA General Counsel Scott Muller around top CIA management for [...]

Yesterday, we talked about how Rahm Emanuel opposed indefinite detention before he started working for it with Lindsey Graham. Today, Steven Aftergood shows that Obama’s two intelligence heads, Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair, supported GAO oversight of intelligence activities before–presumably–they supported yesterday’s veto threat of GAO oversight. As a Congressman in 1987, Leon Panetta actually [...]

I believe Jon Kiriakou is still engaging in disinformation, so while I suppose I’ll read his book, I won’t accept anything in it without corroboration. Take this weird tidbit in his appearance on Tweety (just after 2:05). The statement is false on its face. But it does report an underlying truth. We didn’t know that [...]

Shortly after news broke that CIA destroyed the torture tapes, the 9/11 Commission issued a letter complaining that they had not been told of–much less been allowed to review–the torture tapes. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda [...]